Maintaining Your Web Page

Updating a web page is simple--just overwrite the current file on the web server with your new version by copying the updated version onto the same location as the old version. (Keep the file name the same it was.) It is wise to do this on regular basis, as information can rapidly become out-of-date and inaccurate. Web sites to which you are linking can change addresses or disappear. Even the look of a page can go out of fashion rather quickly.

However, the situation gets more complex if you wish to rename a page, or redesign a large web site. Because the web is highly interconnected, changing your site can impact other sites. If people are linking to you, or they have bookmarked your page, changing the name or location of your files on the web will create broken links on the pages linking to you. This is generally undesirable, especially if you want your page to be easily located or if you have a page that gets a lot of traffic.

Before renaming a web page, or a sequence of pages, contact all who might be interested. For students this is likely to include teachers, students, friends and family members who link or bookmark your pages. For faculty this is likely to include your department web maintainer, students, and colleagues. If you are maintaining a department web site notify the college web master. If you have a popular site, it helps to give advanced notice of changes.

If you do change the name or location of files, you should either delete the outdated files or update them to notify users of the new link location. Some search engines crawl through web sites find and indexing every file. If you do not modify or delete old files, users may find them via these search engines.

Faculty with questions about how to redesign a site should contact their liaison in Academic Computing. Students with questions may contact the Helpdesk.